The “We’re Pretty Sure We Could Have Done More with $45 Million” Award goes to the Gates Foundation and its Measures of Effective Teaching Project.

We think it important to recognize whenever so little is produced at such great cost. The MET researchers gathered a huge data base reporting on thousands of teachers in six cities. Part of the study’s purpose was to address teacher evaluation methods using randomly assigned students. Unfortunately, the students did not remain randomly assigned and some teachers and students did not even participate. This had deleterious effects on the study–limitations that somehow got overlooked in the infinite retelling and exaggeration of the findings.

When the MET researchers studied the separate and combined effects of teacher observations, value-added test scores, and student surveys, they found correlations so weak that no common attribute or characteristic of teacher-quality could be found. Even with 45 million dollars and a crackerjack team of researchers, they could not define an “effective teacher.” In fact, none of the three types of performance measures captured much of the variation in teachers’ impacts on conceptually demanding tests. But that didn’t stop the Gates folks, in a reprise from their 2011 Bunkum-winning ways, from announcing that they’d found a way to measure effective teaching nor did it deter the federal government from strong-arming states into adoption of policies tying teacher evaluation to measures of students’ growth.